The well organised event took place last night at the glamorous 11th floor restaurant of the Imperial Hotel Kota Kinabalu overlooking the South China Sea. The bands were cool, food was delicious, and everyone was looking groovy.

There never was a dull moment when the lively DJ Selina and her sidekick took the stage as the MCs for the event.

Obviously, everything would not be possible without the hardworking organizing committee – the lovely Jacq, Gallivanter (Da Dude), Wei Chuen (you are tall), KadazanBonita (so anggun), PapaJoneh, Impedius, Julian and Farah. I think I chatted briefly with Julian (or was it Impedius). Anyway, hats off to them. I imagine it would be a hard one to top.

Meeting fellow bloggers including Sabahan.com readers face to face was an interesting experience. I’ve met Don (apparently he is one of my subscribers), Lorna (I thought you looked familiar even before we chatted), Pinolobu a.k.a Ben (I already knew you), the famous Elphege Godomon the TV3 reporter. Read more...

It was last year when a Malaysian Minister accused bloggers as liars. According to him out of 8000 of 10,000 unemployed bloggers are women and bloggers have nothing better to do than spreading rumors to disunite the country. Some even resorted to labeling bloggers as Monkeys, Gobloks and Pondan.

Such comments may stem from the lack of understanding of the blogging medium. A medium which may have played a role in the shocking outcome witnessed during the recent general election.

I don’t know to what extent, but it’s enough for the government to reverse their anti-bloggers stance to be the friend of bloggers. For starters, Ahmad Shabery Cheek, our new Information Minister has created a new TV show in RTM inviting bloggers to talk about specific issues about this alternative media. Read more...

As announced by the Malaysian Securities Commission (SC) recently, they have now started to block access to several illegal investment scheme websites. This measure started yesterday, Monday 11 Jun 2007. At the time of this writing, the popular ones such as SwissCash.net and SwissMutualFund.Biz are no longer accessible from within Malaysia.

If data from Alexa.com can be taken into account, Malaysian is by far the largest group of investors in Swiss Cash

Without them, the scheme is already dead. I believe the majority of these investors do not know how to use proxy servers to get around this restriction. Without fresh money coming in – it’s the end of the road for Swiss Cash.

However last time I checked via a proxy, SwissCash.Net seemed to have difficulties serving their pages – perhaps an indication that it’ll be shut down soon by the operator? Read more...

Anyone who is not a US citizen, working on the Internet and get paid in US dollar is feeling the pinch of the weaker dollar.

At the same time, the local currency, Ringgit Malaysia is moving in the opposite direction and is getting stronger by the day. That means the checks I get from Google AdSense, or affiliate commissions from CJ worth less today than they were just a month ago.

If you are a blogger doing pay per post at your blog, you are actually making less money for the same amount of work.

You can choose to receive payments in Ringgit Malaysia if this option is available but from my experience, the service charge for such service and exchange rate they use are probably costlier than when you opt for US dollar payment and exchange it yourself at your local bank. Read more...

According to an article published in The Star Online recently, Malaysia’s Securities Commission (SC) is going to block access to illegal investment schemes operated by some 60 websites after it received 720 complaints and queries.

However no mention on how this will be done and who are they going to work with (MCMC & Telekom?) in order to achieve the objective of preventing access to those websites.

Whether this measure will also block those who try to bypass the restriction by surfing via anonymous proxy will remain to be seen.

Check out SC’s alert list to find the list of websites which are not authorised nor approved under the local securities laws

This is an unwelcome development for those get rich schemes investors. But you still have time to act accordingly as the SC’s exercise to block the website will begin on June 11 2007. Read more...

I always applaud the press for highlighting important issues that could help the public avoid scam websites in their excitement trying to generate extra income from the Internet.

But not this time, recently Utusan Online has published an article about several websites which according to MyCert, the Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team are offering questionable investment schemes.

He believed that professional bloggers were those who where more responsible in ensuring that their web content was based on the truth and not rumors. This certainly helps them in identifying bloggers that ‘have violated the country’s law.

It made me wonder if he even noticed why the previous proposal to register bloggers was met with strong criticisms on the Internet and rejected by the Prime Minster himself.

Perhaps the classification will not be made mandatory and perhaps he hopes that bloggers who choose not to register will not be viewed as trustworthy. Read more...